{"id":38200,"date":"2017-04-10T21:40:38","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T03:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=38200"},"modified":"2025-11-11T09:01:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T16:01:05","slug":"paul-ketzle-carrot-juice-pool-halls-and-creative-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/paul-ketzle-carrot-juice-pool-halls-and-creative-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Ketzle: Carrot Juice, Pool Halls and Creative Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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L<\/span>ike most writers of his generation, Paul Ketzle has spent considerable chunks of his time honing his craft at creative writing workshops \u2014 the good ones, where \u201cthis is what I see you doing\u201d leads the discussion, as well as the bad ones, where it\u2019s \u201cif this were my story . . .\u201d But he also had that important year making carrot juice in Oregon.<\/h4>\n

The University of Utah professor \u2014 you\u2019ll find him on the main floor of the University Honors Center, usually in close proximity to a black fedora and yellow legal pad \u2014 is a Southern boy. He grew up in Florida, getting his writing hands dirty as editor of his high school newspaper in Miami before going to Florida State, where he studied creative writing. Four years later, with graduate school acceptance in hand, he was unsure of exactly what he wanted to do. So he deferred, and went west, to Eugene, Oregon, where he knew just one person (but that individual had the requisite sleep-worthy couch). He spent his days at an organic juice co-op, peeling carrots and cutting out their imperfections before shredding them and feeding them into a juicer. His nights he spent catching up on his reading \u2014\u00a0Don Quixote<\/em>,\u00a0The Name of the Rose<\/em>, whatever came to mind that needed to be read and hadn\u2019t been. \u201cI caught up on a lot of stuff and I got exposed to some really cool stuff,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it started to shape, I guess, the writer I am now.\u201d In Eugene, he also met Marcia \u2014 she was working the orange shift while he shredded carrots \u2014 and when he headed back to Florida, for graduate work at his alma mater, she went with him.<\/h4>\n

With an M.A. in his hand, and rings on their fingers, the couple came west again, for his Ph.D. at the University of Utah. It was here that he wrote\u00a0The Late Matthew Brown<\/em>, a book that took 15 years from the original germ of an idea to publication. As many first novels are, it\u2019s a catchall, sweeping up a variety of interests that had been floating in his mind. It\u2019s set in the South \u2014 he had to come to Utah, he says, to write about his home \u2014 where the life of the titular character, a somewhat placid player in the political structures of the New South, is complicated by the arrival of a precocious 12-year-old daughter he has never met before. The novel has elements of political thriller and mystery, and weaves plotlines that deal with environmentalism, capital punishment, race, and family history, but the core of the book is this father-daughter relationship. \u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine what it would be like to have a child,\u201d he says of beginning the novel. \u201cSo I decided to write a character who doesn\u2019t know either, and suddenly finds himself a father.\u201d The fact that, between conception and completion of the book, Ketzle himself became a father (he has two daughters, 11 and 5) helped turn Hero from a simple foil to Matthew to an integral part of the novel.<\/h4>\n
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\u201cKetzle has written here a novel that reflects back on the reader like a skim of oil in our cup of broth. We are all Matthew Brown. I personally know three Matthew Browns, all of whom, at the moment, are still alive. But we all will face death and our own accounting\u2026\u201d\u00a0From the 15 Bytes review<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Ketzle says it took him three years to write the first 50 pages, but the imperative to finish his dissertation helped him finish that last 250 in six months. The manuscript won Utah\u2019s original writing contest (2006), and after what Ketzle calls a considerable rewrite, the novel was published by Apprentice House (2015), and became a finalist for last year\u2019s 15 Bytes Book Award. That, and his more than a decade in the state, should be sufficient to firmly establish the Florida native as a \u201cUtah writer.\u201d It doesn\u2019t hurt that in conversation you\u2019ll notice little hint of a Southern drawl \u2014 though he has a ways to go before he\u2019ll be saying words like \u201cLayton\u201d and \u201cmountains\u201d in all their consonantal elusiveness. That linguistic marker may be for the second generation \u2014 the Ketzle family has settled themselves in the Forest Dale section of Sugar House, beneath the shadow of I-80, where they are currently renovating a house.<\/h4>\n

At the university, Ketzle shares an office with Elik Press publisher Andy Hoffmann and he says he\u2019s increasingly coming to terms with the fact that, as his colleague Francois Camoin would put it, he\u2019s a teacher who writes. But he seems comfortable in that role. Both Florida State\u2019s and the U\u2019s programs emphasized academic rigor and creative writing in equal measure, so he finds his courses on rhetoric and writing in the research university a\u00a0comfortable fit. In a perfect world he might be teaching more fiction, but he enjoys the challenge of working with students from multiple disciplines, trying to bridge the divide of C.P. Snow\u2019s \u201ctwo cultures\u201d \u2014 and relishing the opportunity to point out to his science students that they have a hard time describing their work without resorting to literary tools like metaphor.<\/h4>\n

Though he teaches critical thinking and logic, Ketzle has seen that in life \u2014 whether in politics or personal relationships \u2014 people don\u2019t understand the world through logic, they understand it through story. \u201cStory and narrative is fundamental to all of our understanding,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s the way your brain understands and organizes the world.\u201d So if you receive information that doesn\u2019t fit your narrative, you dismiss it or transform it. Which is where fiction comes in. \u201cI\u2019m enough of an optimist that I believe if you can tell the story right, you can get people to appreciate greater complexity. Good fiction gets us closer to understanding the complexities, it teaches us to think better, to empathize better.\u201d<\/h4>\n

When he\u2019s not teaching, Ketzle is at work on his second novel, a draft of which he hopes to have finished by the end of the year. It\u2019s set in the South again, but this time during the Civil War (Ketzle\u2019s ancestors came from both sides of the Mason Dixon line). It is the end of the war, with Lee\u2019s army trapped outside of Richmond at the Siege of Petersburg, but the book ranges as far afield as Japan and Cuba as it follows four characters\u2019 storylines, trying to uncover how they\u2019re all related. His novels, he says, \u201cstart with a character and a place. And some idea. Even if it\u2019s just a feeling and you\u2019re not quite sure what the idea is.\u201d The Civil War intrigues him as a transformative event, the creation of a new America, and a new idea of Americanness \u2014 it provides him an opportunity to explore race and gender, the mutability of identity, and what was lost and what was gained in 1865.<\/h4>\n

\u201cNovels are great opportunities to explore things that are not really easy to understand,\u201d he says. He researches heavily \u2014 for the first novel he learned more about pesticides than he cares to remember, and for the second anachronisms are a minefield \u2014 and plot and backstory are intricately worked to create meaning in the novel. But in the end, he is eager to remain curious, to explore the mystery of his characters and ideas. \u00a0It\u2019s similar, he says, to how he plays pool. \u201cI\u2019m an intuitive pool player,\u201d he tells his friends when they insist he call his shots. \u201cI think, I\u2019m gonna bank it off here, and maybe that ball will go in the corner pocket but something else might happen. And if it does, \u2018Was that wrong? Did I know that was going to happen?\u2019 I may have not consciously known it but did I still know it?\u201d Writing is similar. He\u2019s grasping at something, though he\u2019s not always sure what, and he\u2019s confident that in the process of reaching, something interesting will happen. \u201cMy work better mean more than I intended it to mean,\u201d he says of his approach.<\/h4>\n

That\u2019s where that year in Eugene and gallons of carrot juice comes in handy. You never know what literary topspin you might absorb from long nights of reading.<\/h4>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Paul Ketzle will be reading from his novel in progress at the\u00a0READ LOCAL, Finch Lane Reading Series<\/a>, Thursday April 27, 7 pm. In this Finch Gallery reading series, a collaboration between Salt Lake City Arts Council and 15 Bytes and support from Utah Humanities, we pair emerging local writers with established writers for a reading and discussion of their work. Jim Ure, recent winner of the Utah Original Writing Competition will be participating as well.<\/p>\n

Read Larry Menlove\u2019s review of\u00a0The Late Matthew Brown<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Like most writers of his generation, Paul Ketzle has spent considerable chunks of his time honing his craft at creative writing workshops \u2014 the good ones, where \u201cthis is what I see you doing\u201d leads the discussion, as well as the bad ones, where it\u2019s \u201cif this were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3033,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-author-profile","category-literary-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/paulketzle-930x642.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-19 06:21:42","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38200"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98465,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38200\/revisions\/98465"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}